Games of the week
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Hotline Miami Collection
Platform: Switch
Genre: Action
Price: £22.99
Hold the phone for a classic killer
Hotline Miami's ultra violent top-down shooter was a breakout indie smash in 2012, and this collection includes both games from the series. Each combines brutal difficulty and bloody action with a hallucinogenic visual style, tasking your nameless anti-hero with slaughtering level after level of tooled up mobsters. Controls are tight and stakes are high but lives are limitless, creating pacy and exciting shootouts that avoid repetition through randomised weaponry and enemies. Sadly, while the original was enjoyably bonkers, the sequel is cruder, less sophisticated and forces you into certain play styles, upsetting the delicate balance of outlandish gore and puzzle-like challenge. Hotline Miami is fantastic, but bundling the two titles together means Switch owners end up paying over the odds.
Skip to the end: Swallow the expense for the ruthless brilliance of the original.
Score: 8/10
Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG
Price: £23.99
Horror on repeat
Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones submerges you in the esoteric horror of HP Lovecraft, where terrors pulsate in the dark and sacrifices are made to depraved deities. The RPG element of the game revels in this sinister setting, demanding that you preserve your sanity as well as health in order to survive among the ruins of Arkham, a city dragged into Lovecraft's nightmarish universe. But the turn-based combat is a poor add-on, marred by repetitive enemies and an unclear ruleset, and the 2D visuals (which eerily echo David Firth's grim Salad Fingers cartoons) also fail the concept with their sparsely detailed and flat environments.
Skip to the end: Drab design and dreary combat spoil the rich atmosphere.
Score: 5/10
WARSAW
Platform: PC
Genre: Strategy
Price: £18.99
Rebel cause
It's 1944 and Polish resistance forces are assaulting a weakened Nazi army. In WARSAW you battle through the titular capital, choosing your next move at HQ before scavenging for resources, interrupting enemy plans or ambushing German patrols in missions across the city. Initially the game throws so many layers of conflict at you that it feels messy and overcomplicated, from turn-based skirmishes where success is reliant on squad positioning to the multiple-choice events that pop up during your 'point and click' cityscape exploration. Underneath the noise, however, WARSAW is a limited and simple game whose tactical tools are never satisfying enough to incite a dedicated following.
Skip to the end: Hardbitten charm can't enliven the basic strategy.
Score: 6/10
Pagan Online
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG
Price: £19.99
False gods
Pagan Online is aiming for action-RPG gamers who love to grind. It's got the ingredients, from hordes of monsters to the exotic line-up of warriors and a skill tree full of energetic strikes, and a neat XP system encourages using multiple heroes. Yet, though controls follow a 'twin-stick' approach that should enhance the thrill, attacks don't flow pleasingly (unlike the wonderful Victor Vran, say) and Pagan Online's boring, linear maps and bite-sized mission structure leaves it feeling shallow and light on atmosphere, while co-op mode is bafflingly restricted to just two players. Not that Pagan Online will attract enough worshippers to make that a problem.
Skip to the end: A weak and hollow replica of classic action-RPG idols.
Score: 5/10
